Section: US & Canada

BEIJING — Western values are a “ticket to hell,” a newspaper published by China’s Communist Party said in a recent editorial that held up Ukraine and some Arab countries as examples of outside ideas causing turmoil. In the two-plus years since President Xi Jinping took the helm of the ruling Communist Party, state media have become more...

Last June, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon issued a far-reaching administrative ruling that offered marital benefits for the first time to all of its lesbian and gay employees, as well as to other U.N. workers that had entered legally-recognized domestic partnerships. On Monday, the Russian Federation gave the plan a resounding nyet. Speaking...

Some of the tens of thousands in Moscow protesting the murder of Boris Nemtsov, March 1, 2015. (Alexander Aksakov/Getty Images) (JTA) — During the past two years, Dima Zicer has skipped several political rallies opposing the chauvinistic policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin. A Jewish scholar of education from St. Petersburg, Zicer, 55,...

REUTERS/Social media via Reuters TV Islamic State’s most horrific video to date, the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians, was shocking not only for its unsettling content but for its novel setting. It was not shot in the deserts of Iraq or Syria but on a beach in Libya, far from where the U.S. and its allies have been bombing the group. The...

Russian opposition leader’s Boris Nemtsov’s assassination last week came as no surprise to Russia’s or Ukraine’s polities, and should come as none to Western governments and leaders. Failing an extraordinarily unlikely, voluntary, and credible confession from the assassin(s), it will remain unsolved, simply another murder...

BRUSSELS (AP) — Russia and Ukraine reached an agreement late Monday to ensure natural gas supplies to war-torn Ukraine for the month of March, averting possible cuts that could have hit supplies to the European Union. Under the deal sealed in Brussels, Ukraine’s Naftogaz will pre-pay and order sufficient quantities of gas to ensure all...

Kiev (AFP) – The chief witness in the murder of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who had complained of being kept under guard in Moscow, was able to leave Russia and is now on her way to Kiev, Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesman said late Monday.”Ganna Duritska has just left for Kiev. Ukrainian diplomats in Moscow...

MOSCOW — The 23-year-old Ukrainian model who was with slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov tearfully recounted Monday their last dinner in a chic Red Square restaurant and their walk onto a nearby bridge — but said she did not see the gunman who pulled the trigger.The emotional account by Anna Duritskaya came amid a swirl of speculation about...

The U.S. government’s senior intelligence official said that he believes the Obama administration should give Kiev “lethal defensive weapons” for its struggle against the Russian-backed separatists battling the country’s military in eastern Ukraine Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Council on Foreign Relations...